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Time to preserve those floppy disks

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Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#11

Post by tambourine_man »

bombcar wrote: post #9
BizarreByte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time. And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all. I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in i…

Someone once told me that data is measured in gigabytes, but valuable data in bytes. He wasn’t wrong.

I regard music, photos and video as extremely valuable, so that doesn’t apply to me.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#12

Post by dredmorbius »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #4

> this document was handed back to the court system, and Maryland has now exonerated not one but two individuals from wrongful accusation … These men did time in jail, their permanent records impacted. Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the article to draw people in. Instead, it’s at the end.

If that's what the main thrust of the article was about, I'd say yes.

This one, though was far more about the journey than the destination.

(This isn't always the case, and is arguably far less often the case than authors tend to think. But I feel it's more than fairly applied in this instance.)

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#13

Post by z500 »

pcshah1996 wrote: post #6

One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/ It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

I once wrote a program to actually do this for me when that was all I had to migrate files off my computer. But that was like 25 years ago so the files weren't so big.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#15

Post by 13of40 »

BizarreByte wrote: post #7
pcshah1996 wrote: post #6

One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/ It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time. And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all. I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in i…

> I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.

I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. The Staff Sergeant who ran the office was paranoid about losing everything in a hard drive failure, so the first thing he made me do was move all of them off to floppy disks. (I remember he called A: "the alpha drive" if that gives you any hint on his level of tech savviness.) Maybe the disks were old. Maybe it was the humidity. At any rate, it was only a couple of weeks before half that stuff was unreadable.

At the same time, I remember one time I crumpled up one of those 5.25 inch floppies in my TRS-80 programming class in high school, then I realized there was something I wanted off of it and flattened it back out - and it worked!

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#16

Post by amatecha »

Coincidentally I just picked up a Greaseweazle[0] recently with the purpose of recovering data from some very old 5.25" floppies. A family member worked at a magazine and has given me some disks that should contain original digital docs from some of the earliest issues of that magazine (hopefully including the cover/title layout, based on one of the disk labels). Looking forward to seeing what I can dig up... Hopefully the disks are still vaguely-readable after ~40 years!

[0] https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#17

Post by BizarreByte »

tambourine_man wrote: post #11
bombcar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me that data is measured in gigabytes, but valuable data in bytes. He wasn’t wrong.

I regard music, photos and video as extremely valuable, so that doesn’t apply to me.

I do too, but for me there are levels of importance and my backup strategy reflects that.

There are files I can't live without, files I don't want to lose (photos), and the rest.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#18

Post by c22 »

Bluecobra wrote: post #3

Interesting, I knew about *.wav files for data cassette images but not for floppies. Makes me wonder if there’s other ways to get the data off it that might be more accurate. Are hobbyist electron microscopes a thing yet? :)

I've seen one: https://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2011/03/diy-scanning-electro...

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#19

Post by [deleted] »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #4

> this document was handed back to the court system, and Maryland has now exonerated not one but two individuals from wrongful accusation … These men did time in jail, their permanent records impacted. Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the article to draw people in. Instead, it’s at the end.

[deleted]

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#20

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #8

One of the links in this article leads down a heck of a rabbit hole for those of you who love ultra-tiny keyboards: Plover, the open-source stenography engine, which uses what is essentially a 15% chording keyboard and a very dense shortcut expansion dictionary to let you type at ~200-300 wpm vs. the 40-120 wpm of QWERTY. https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/ Yes, there are people who use it for programming, too.…

[deleted]
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